Magento Inc. announced the release of an updated Enterprise Edition that offers new features, full-page caching enhancements, and a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant payment bridge.
The new Enterprise Edition 1.9 is a boon for web developers working with the solution on at least two fronts. First, it's PCI DSS compliant payment bridge puts to rest any questions about whether or not the application is in scope by simply offering to demonstrate compliance. Second, the new full-page caching module should significantly improve page load times and general site performance. In both cases, the improvements make a developer's job a lot easier.
Payment Bridge
The Enterprise Edition 1.9's payment bridge was certified by Coalfire, a PCI Qualified Security Assessor (QSA), to meet or exceed the PCI DSS requirements. This may actually not have been a large step technically since some believe that software residing on a secure server has only to meet industry standard coding practices, but the move is significant for the software engineers and developers that would otherwise need to demonstrate PCI compliance.
Effectively, this new payment bridge lets enterprise developers "check off" PCI compliance and move on.
Full-Page Caching
If Magento has two common complaints, they are probably page load times and platform complexity. While the solution's new caching module will do little to address the complexity issue, it should go a long way toward improving page load time for repeat customers or customers viewing several pages.
From the developers standpoint, the module should see measureable improvements that can be shared with management.
Other Features
This latest version of the Magento Enterprise Edition also includes several new features.
There is, for example, support for a gift registry. This feature should work well for sites that sell products which could be wedding or anniversary gifts, as an example.
The new version also supports the creation and management of customer attributes. This should allow ecommerce marketers to better target customers with promotions and better understand how customers interact with their site.
Magento has also made improvements to its Solr Search engine's performance, including layered navigation to search results; offering support for mis-spellings, synonyms, and stop words; and allowing developers to weight product attributes so that a matched term in a product title might outweigh an identical term in a product description.
Summing Up
Magento actually hinted at the Enterprise Edition 1.9 release in a recent webinar, and then delivered everything that they presented. This is, perhaps, an indication that the company has been aggressive in updating its ecommerce platform. The new Enterprise Edition now sells for $12,990 per year.
